How to make your website international?

Ella Petlicka 00:05
Hello, thank you for your time. And this is a session on how to make your website International. I hope it will be a good use of your time. And let's dive in. My name is Ella and I work at Pinterest. I'm based in San Francisco. And for the last two years, I've been driving the internationalization program for Pinterest websites, hence the topic for this session. And my goal for this session is not to give you a checklist to take off when you carry out your web application project. My goal is to show you how to take a step back and look at your entire web experience, and show what you as a localization expert can bring to the table when you're discussing International website experience with other stakeholders. Because while people like us have a lot to contribute, international websites are not only the work of one team, it actually requires a small village to pull it off. But before we get there, let's start with the basics. at Pinterest, all our teams are committed to the same mission, it's to bring everyone the inspiration to create a life they love. And we hear this line many times when we go to our all hands meeting. But especially in the international context, we wanted to emphasize the every one part of this mission. So no matter what country you live in, no matter what language you speak, no matter which device you use, we want to make sure that everyone finds inspiration on Pinterest that you find inspiration on Pinterest, people like us, we usually do that through localization, we make sure that our websites are international are truly global. And that means that they are well translated were well localized. But I very consciously decided to avoid this word in the title of my presentation, and chose to often use another word when I'm talking about my work. And its adaptation. Because to fully achieve to achieve a fully, truly international result, it often requires us to adapt. Instead of thinking how can we localize that content, we should possibly start asking the question is that a good user experience? Is that making an international impact. And that way of thinking that approach does require adaptation. It might require adaptation of content adaptation of our production. But probably first and foremost, adaptation of the way we are thinking about the web experience for global users. What I want to start with is that user experience and user journey. And the reason why I want to start with it is because unless you are launching a brand new site, building that site from scratch, what you will experience is that you will often be working on specific pages specific sections within the site. But because of that there might be this perception to treat each individual page, or each translation requests separately. It's a new request. It's a new project, we translate we we do QA where we are done. But the reality is that the entire site is more like an ecosystem ecosystem of content, your end user will not experience just one page, they can land onto that specific page, either through organic traffic through some sort of promotion. But once they are on that page, they are actually likely to navigate to other pages to explore the rest of the site. Now that exploration, that journey needs to be consistent, consistently localized. And it also needs to make sense. And in this way, localization of websites, even if it's a marketing site, is very similar actually to product localization. And there are several ways you can approach this. You can approach this user experience and user journey, if you think about the scope of content for localization. So the First approach is translated all, you can decide to localize everything on the site into all the site languages. Obviously, that would be the most expensive approach. But let's set the cost implications aside and think what the user experience user journeys going to look like. Now, the benefit of this approach is that even in a very easy way, you can de risk the experience of your user, your end user, your international users stumbling upon content that is on localized. So that's the benefit. But there's something else for you to bear in mind. So if you localize your entire content, you can, at the same time create this impression that the features, the programs, the services that are present on that site, are fully since they are fully localized, the content about them is fully localized. The impression you will go you're going to create is that those features, programs or services are also available in those languages. And in those markets. And in some cases, that might not be entirely true. That is something that we experienced at Pinterest, as well, as well. And I'm sure many of you in other companies too, I'm going to show you how we dealt with it. I'm not saying this is how you need to address this challenge, but just giving you some ideas and potential workarounds. So we actually work closely with our product and content teams to make sure that we include messaging on the regional availability already in our English copy, the one that goes for translation. And having that messaging in the copy allows us to very quickly communicate to our users where the feature is available or is not available, and to not worry about the wrong expectations. And on top of that, if we are also including messaging like Hey, stay tuned, we are working on expanding that into additional markets. That creates, that sends a message to our users that we didn't forget about them. And we are doing something working very actively on bringing these features, services or programs to their markets. Now another another thing that we did was creating special pages or banners with availability. So we can easily link these pages throughout our entire content ecosystem. If we are using a banner, if you want to use the banners about our that would show up at the top of the page, whenever the user comes, comes from a market that doesn't have that feature, or service available. That's something just bear in mind that this is something you would need help with from your engineering team. So it's a little bit more complicated to pull off from the technical perspective. Another approach could be to translate some of the content into some of the site languages. Now, certain companies decided to localize their most popular pages, they evaluate the traffic, they want to see which pages are popular, and then they decide to to just translate them into their selected target languages. On the other hand, you also might have content that is only relevant in certain markets. And do you need to translate it into specific locales, that approach can actually complicate things a lot. So if you're thinking about user journey, but you only localize, let's say, half of the pages on the site, what is the user journey user experience going to look like? It will depend on your setup. But it might often look like that. You get a 404 error page. A page that says oh, this page doesn't exist. It looks like you're lost. Don't worry, you didn't break the internet. You just cannot find what you're looking for. And no matter how funny how attractive you try to make this page, if your user sees that that page that message several times, it will be a very bad experience. Another thing that you can do is to display English content. You don't have the translation, you display the English the original copy instead of a 404 message, it's possibly a better solution a better experience. But again, if that happens to your user several times, and the user doesn't realize that they are navigating to an English experience to churn Experience page in another language, it will also be considered as an error, and that experience will also be negative. Now, one of the ways to manage this user experience would be to separate your evergreen content. Evergreen content is your forever content content that is always globally relevant from content that is editorial that is seasonal, that is more current and subject to changes. And building this kind of infrastructure will allow you to localize the evergreen content, so you're forever content into all site languages, while at the same time you will be able to keep the seasonal content, seasonal up to date, and local. The seasonal content might often come in the form of a blog post. And what you're actually seeing here is our blog directory for for UK, and Brazil. Now what you can see that well more both markets leverage from global blog posts more generic blog posts to a certain degree. Both of them also feature content that is relevant just for them. Now, building this kind of interest, infrastructure is most likely not your job. But this is something that you as a localization driver should flag in any conversation about web user experience. Or you should flag it when bringing during infrastructure calls or calls about content management systems. Speaking of user experience, I wanted to mention specifically the mobile experience, the reason why I wanted to bring it up as a separate item is because of how important it is. Mobile devices can these days account for higher and higher percentage of traffic. If you have access to your site analytics, check which devices your users are using to access your site. And especially for current consumer sites, it wouldn't be surprising to see mobile traffic account for like really high percentage of traffic more than half. Now what that means. That is that the mobile experience needs to get at least as much attention as the web experience, if not even more. So you need to test your content, specifically on mobile devices. Now, what you're going to see here is in this slide is an actual page viewed on both mobile device and on a 13 inch display laptop. Look how different the experiences. Look how the layout is slightly different between the devices, how the components are structured differently. What that means for us, for teams with that deal with international content, is that there are so many more opportunities for errors and for bugs. Now, great translation, good rate international copy, great user experience will only serve you well. If your potential customers or your potential users are able to find your site. And that is exactly when or SEO comes in. SEO are the steps that you can take that should help you your website rank higher on search engines. Now, you can get traffic to your site so we can get more people to your site in various ways. You can do paid promotion, you can try to promote your site on social media to get more traffic. What SEO does is that it helps you boost another potential source of traffic, which is organic traffic, which which is basically people browsing for something on the internet. And SEO can actually help you open yourself up to a potential new pool of users or customers. It can be especially helpful if your brand isn't very well known in the region, or if your site is brand new because it's going to To give you a boost to your to that online visibility, just by making sure that your international copy uses the same keywords that your international users are looking for. Now, in order to use these keywords, you need to know what they are. Which means that you need to run some research, you might want to run this research using tools like Google Trends, Google Search Console, or other keyword explorers. But the priority for you here would be finding these keywords. So the phrases that international users are looking for, for each market. International SEO is a separate topic that we could have several hour long sessions on on the international SEO and SEO in general. So what I'm going to try to do here is barely scratched the surface. I'll be mentioning SEO more as a thing for you to be aware of, rather than showing very specific steps. And I'll start by mentioning what might not work. And that will be optimizing the page for SEO and then simply translating the content, especially translating the keywords. Now, in some cases, this approach might work, your users across different markets might be looking for similar things. And because of that translation might be enough to drive that extra organic traffic to your site. But the reality is that you don't know what they're looking for, until you do your research. Now, what the research might show you is that users from different markets are searching for entirely different things. In the worst case scenario. If you're translating your content, it means that you're using you are optimizing your site for demand for traffic that doesn't even exist. If your users if users people on on the internet are not looking for certain things, it won't help your site. Too much mention those things, those keywords in the copy. Now, if you are seeing different keyword patterns from international users, at some point, you might realize that, hey, we would love to optimize, we would like like to include those keywords, when we simply don't have the relevant copy on our site. How do we optimize the site, if we don't have content that covers these topics, that doesn't necessarily mean that you need to immediately start creating local language content, quite the opposite. It might actually be be an opportunity for you for your team to raise that with your cross functional stakeholders and say, Hey, this is what our research shows. That's what our international users want to read about. That's what they wanted to see. Do you think it's relevant? Do you think it's beneficial for all the users? Do you think it would make sense to prioritize creating content about these topics? Now on one of our sites, we actually carried out keyword research for some of our for the US, as well as some of our international markets. And what we learned was that in several markets, the users were really keen on finding out what is Pinterest? How does it work? How can they interact with it, and just getting this very basic understanding of how our product works? We discussed that with our partners with with with other team members. And what we heard, yes, this is actually great feedback. And this is the topic that is relevant to all our markets. Let's create content to address that particular feedback. And the page that you are looking at looking at right now, it was born exactly, because as a result of us listening to the international voice, and it has been one of our most popular pages ever since. Now, even if your research shows that your international users are searching for similar things, they might be using some very specific words or phrases to describe that very same thing. That way simply translating a list of keywords doesn't necessarily solve your problem. Users might actually opt for a synonym and you can And again, you can determine that without doing your research. That's something that we noticed when we were researching one of our traffic for one of our sites on pin on the Pinterest app, we do have something that is called dark mode. But we discovered that in many languages, the users in their searches were alternating between dark mode and night mode. And just having this knowledge allowed us to optimize the content, and make sure that make sure that we are driving traffic, driving those users to the right place. And if you think about it like that, the key to achieving good SEO is simply knowing your users. And then applying your knowledge, this knowledge in content development. There are some potential quick wins for SEO that would allow you to level up your performance. And they don't necessarily involve creating a lot of extra content or putting in a lot of effort into optimizing the copy for SEO. So the first one are backlinks. backlinking means that you are putting links to your site on other websites. And you can do that through your entire ecosystem of sub sites of sites. Now, if your company has a help center, and knowledge base, a community site or some sort of a marketing site, all the site sites could potentially backlink to one another. But on top of that, you're local teams. So your teams in different countries might have their own local sites or own local profiles. And you might also want to use these to backlink to the sites that you are managing. All that will potentially help boost your traffic in three different ways. So one, the first very obvious one is you're promoting your site. If the if a person visiting already your Help Center. Visiting your help center navigates to a backlink to your marketing site, they're actually very likely very likely to navigate to that marketing site. They are already we know that they are already interested in your company, maybe they want to read more about it. Now links are also how engines, search engines discover content, a crawler will often to arrive to your site from another site through that backlink. So having backlinks also helps the browser index your page faster. And as a result, it will help it show in the search results faster. But most importantly, the quality of your backlinks can help you rank rank higher in search engine result pages. Now, if a if the backlink to your site lives on a site that has a high authority, a lot of visibility, some of that authority is actually transferred to your site and can improve your visibility and the way you can think about it. If your product is recommended by a well known influencer by a superstar, it instantly gains credibility. And it's very similar with with SEO, if your site is recommended through those backlinks by another very popular site. Your site also gains credibility in the eyes of the search engine. So the takeaway here is cross promote your web content. Your marketing team is most likely already doing that for your main sub sites. But again, local markets might have some regional outlets where it might be worth promoting your side's outtakes so out outtakes is usually perceived as an accessibility tool. People who are visually impaired will often rely on architects when navigating the web. Whenever else X is available, it will be read out loud to users that are that are hearing that are visually impaired. And for these users, this outtakes is is an essential, it's something essential to their online experience. And actually setting their SEO aside, it's important to localize the abstracts so that your international users will have an equally accessible experience to your US users. But outtakes also helps search engines understand your images in and understand your images, as well as the content in which they are placed. And as a result, it helps them index your images site images more accurately. And why is that important? Those images can be found on search engines, for example, through Google image search. And in some cases, it might actually be easier for you to optimize your images for SEO, and be more competitive in the image category than to optimize the rest of the site. On top of that, search engines, consider websites without text as more SEO friendly, it helps you boost your ranking and having different language but on the other hand, having different languages on the same page makes it more difficult for for the search engine to determine which language is primary. So if you have page, a page in Spanish, with a localized alt text in English, you're search the search engine might might actually struggle to determine whether it's a Spanish page or an English page. So that's an additional gain. For advantage of localizing, of localizing our texts. We are simply not confusing the search engines. So the takeaway here is first, make sure that you provide good alt text. Secondly, make sure that that alt text is localized. But the main takeaway for the SEO chapter is be patient. SEO, search engine optimization is not a matter of days, it often takes days, if not even weeks, simply to index your content. SEO is a long game, and it can take months before seeing any improvements. Last but not least, creating locally. Now one of the best way to make sure to ensure great international user experience is actually not to localize not to translate at all, but to develop content that is local. And yes, we know that the translation is cheaper. Yes, we know that translation is way faster than writing from scratch. Because imagine trying to get approvals from five or 10 Different people for the content that is being developed. And yes, translation is more scalable. But generic global pieces might not have the same impact. As a piece that is written especially for you in your language, referring to your celebrities, your local events, your culture, your festivities, a piece that is written on topic that on a topic that users from your market wants to read about. And hear there's a slight nod to that, SEO and to that keyword research you would perform to to optimize search engines to optimize your site for search engines. Because that key these keywords come in very handy when creating local contents to know what you're seeing here is content that we created specifically for our users in Brazil. That content has information that is most likely relevant, and also interesting for users in Brazil. But at the same time, this is one of our best performing content in our Brazilian blog. Now, creating local content is often not the job of traditionally built localization teams. We don't create content from scratch, we scale other people's efforts. But at the same time, our teams are often the ones that enable international impact. So in a way, if local content if Creating local content helps us our company to make an international impact. It enables growth, it brings value to the company, it could also be perceived as part of our job. And we, localization teams are actually in great position to scale that effort. First of all, we constantly interact with many local many regional teams or country teams that are eager to acknowledge that are eager to create content. And they also have, they also have the knowledge about users. What they don't have is access to resources to writers, designers, QA leads, we localization teams, we work with linguists, we work with vendors, our vendors might already have good writers, or some of our linguist could potentially double up as, as writers. We also work with design teams with DTP teams. So we already have access to many of these resources. And we are also, we also often work very closely alongside the core teams core content teams that create that content in in your headquarters. And to try to create global content. These teams have certain guidelines, certain processes, certain tools that they are using in content creation. And we look isolation teams, we are actually in a position to create a bridge between these two teams and allow local teams to replicate what the core teams are doing. And in a way that is often going to be our wall to serve as a bridge between country teams, and between the core teams. So the four main takeaways, keep an eye on the user journey. Make sure that the user journey is well localized, well adapted, it makes sense for your international users. Don't forget about mobile experience. Your site needs to be tested on mobile devices. Now your users do some research, find out what they are interested in, find out if there are any keywords you can use in your international copy that could boost that organic traffic and consider creating content locally. But overall, and most importantly, be the voice for your international users. When I talk about my role, I don't say that I do localization, I prefer to say that my role is to create great international user experience and make sure that we are able to make a global impact. And if that's my role, it means that listening to that international voice is the key to my success. As in as amplifying that voice and making sure that the people that build websites that help create those websites are aware of that voice. And besides, if you are not the one standing up for the international voice, who's going to do that. Thank you for your time. I hope this presentation was a valuable use of it and have a great day ahead.